Charge your iPhone by walking (Video)
Posted by: Jon on 05/27/2013 09:21 AM
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Mechanical engineering students from Rice University have developed a shoe that can charge a mobile phone by simply waling down the road.
"We went to the lab and saw the force distribution across the bottom of your foot, to see where the most force is felt,” Morilla said. “We found it would be at the heel and at the balls of your toes, as you push off. We went with the heel because, unless you’re sprinting, you’re letting gravity do the work.”
Their devices as currently designed are admittedly too big for day-to-day wear, but the prototypes developed at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen with the team’s advisers, David McStravick and Omar Kabir, meet the benchmarks set by the company. McStravick is a professor in the practice of mechanical engineering and materials science; Kabir is a senior principle research engineer in corporate technology at Cameron.
PediPower is a transplantable unit that can be installed into most common walking shoes. It uses a lever arm that – upon heel strike of a walk – pivots at the mid foot and reaches to the heel to rotate a drive gear. A gearbox located in the rear half of the outsole converts the low speed/high torque rotation into low torque/high speed rotation. The output shaft from the gearbox then drives a generator that is mounted in a housing directly below the ankle bone on the outside of the shoe. Electrical current generated flows through wires up each leg to a regulation and storage system mounted on the hip. The shoe device can be locked in the compressed position for operation as a normal shoe and the charging wires can be easily detached when the shoes are removed.
The final device was able to generate 200mW of usable power to charge a battery pack that can be used to power small mobile electronics. Furthermore, metabolic testing concluded that the device did not cause a significant increase in oxygen consumption on the user.
"We went to the lab and saw the force distribution across the bottom of your foot, to see where the most force is felt,” Morilla said. “We found it would be at the heel and at the balls of your toes, as you push off. We went with the heel because, unless you’re sprinting, you’re letting gravity do the work.”
Their devices as currently designed are admittedly too big for day-to-day wear, but the prototypes developed at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen with the team’s advisers, David McStravick and Omar Kabir, meet the benchmarks set by the company. McStravick is a professor in the practice of mechanical engineering and materials science; Kabir is a senior principle research engineer in corporate technology at Cameron.
PediPower is a transplantable unit that can be installed into most common walking shoes. It uses a lever arm that – upon heel strike of a walk – pivots at the mid foot and reaches to the heel to rotate a drive gear. A gearbox located in the rear half of the outsole converts the low speed/high torque rotation into low torque/high speed rotation. The output shaft from the gearbox then drives a generator that is mounted in a housing directly below the ankle bone on the outside of the shoe. Electrical current generated flows through wires up each leg to a regulation and storage system mounted on the hip. The shoe device can be locked in the compressed position for operation as a normal shoe and the charging wires can be easily detached when the shoes are removed.
The final device was able to generate 200mW of usable power to charge a battery pack that can be used to power small mobile electronics. Furthermore, metabolic testing concluded that the device did not cause a significant increase in oxygen consumption on the user.
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